Insidious forms: Deleuze, the bodily diagram and the haunted house film

Abstract

Abstract James Wan’s Insidious (2010) at first seems like a run-of-the mill haunted house film. There are ghosts, demons, clichéd jump scares and a terrorized middle-class family. Wan’s seemingly traditional foray into the haunted house genre, however, breaks new ground in its formulation of affect, perception and constructions of the sensuous body in horror film studies. In Insidious it is not the house that suffers from demonic presence and roaming human spirits, but the body itself. Not just a body, but all bodies; those alive and dead, moving and still, believing and nonbelieving and, most notably, those in the film and those viewing it. Through a close analysis of Wan’s film vis-à-vis an examination of Giles Deleuze’s notion of the ‘logic of sensation’ in the paintings of Francis Bacon, I suggest that Insidious presents us with what I call a ‘Bodily Diagram’. In this new theory of formal cinematic horror analysis, I argue that the body and sensation (both that of the viewer and those in the film) can be seen as a ‘structure’ or ‘logic’ that presents a new type of phenomenological and affective theoretical analysis grounded in the very form (or body) of the film itself.